Dear Haddon,
I just wanted to once again let you know how pleased we are with our Aztek® Premier™ Drum Scanner. This is the third Aztek drum scanner I’ve purchased (the first two, you remember, was when I was manager of A&I Digital here in Los Angeles), and they seem to just keep getting better.

Before buying another Premier I pondered whether it was necessary to reinvestigate what alternatives might exist in the market today. Previously I had compared the Aztek to ICG and Heidelberg, and found the Premier held it’s own in hardware and bested them both in software. Since little R&D has been invested in drum scanning technology since — except at Aztek — I concluded I would just be wasting my time revisiting the competition.

The work we do at Lumiere places perhaps some of the greatest demands on a scanner ever possible in digital print making today. Our clients, many of whom are world–renowned artists and photographers, expect that the Lightjet digital photographs we produce for them (up to 6x10 feet in size) not reveal a single trace of digital intervention. Thanks to the Premier, when we scan an 8×10 negative and then enlarge and crop it to 6x10 feet, at close inspection the final print exhibits only the detail and structure of the original film itself — no pixels, no noise, no digital artifacts.

Clearly, it all starts with the scan, which makes the Premier the foundation in our digital workflow. I highly recommend the Aztek Premier as a real-world solution in the realm of high-end digital imaging.